Slack's Deal With Atlassian Means the End of Hipchat, Stride

By
Rob Marvin27 Jul 2018, 8:32 a.m.

Atlassian will discontinue its team collaboration apps, Hipchat and Stride, admitting defeat and uniting with Slack to take on Microsoft Teams.

If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. Slack has knocked off some of its team messaging app competition by welcoming them into the fold. The company today announced a partnership with Atlassian to buy the intellectual property for its Hipchat and Stride apps and discontinue them.

Starting today, Stride is no longer accepting any new teams. Existing groups can continue to add users and use Stride and Hipchat Cloud products until February 15, 2019. Atlassian's 2,600-plus employees will also begin using Slack.

Slack and Atlassian announced the partnership in coordinated blog posts, calling it "a joint vision of simplifying and automating the huge amount of effort that teams everywhere expend to stay aligned, coordinated, and productive." The companies are not disclosing the exact terms of the deal, but did reveal that Atlassian will also make a small equity investment in Slack as a commitment to partnering long-term.

Atlassian is discontinuing Hipchat Server and Hipchat Data Center as well, and will work with Slack to migrate users from all four products. The companies also pledged to co-develop tighter native integrations between Slack and Atlassian's other products, including Jira, Trello, and Bitbucket.

Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield revealed more details about the deal in a series of tweets:

… • Atlassian is making a small but symbolically important investment in Slack • We're committing teams on both sides to create deeper and more powerful integrations between Slack and the Atlassian family of products — there's so much to do here!

We share a vision of simplifying and automating the enormous effort that teams everywhere expend just to stay aligned, coordinated and productive. Hundreds of thousands of teams are already using Slack with JIRA, Confluence, Bitbucket, Trello, etc. — this will have a big impact.

Atlassian's announcement said the decision to shutter Stride and Hipchat came down to shifts in an increasingly competitive market. What went unsaid in both companies' statements is that they're partnering up to take on an even bigger competitor in Microsoft Teams.

Joff Redfern, VP of Product at Atlassian, provided PCMag with the following statement on the partnership: "Knowledge workers want best-in-class tools to get their work done, which is why millions of people use both Atlassian and Slack," said Redfern. "This strategic partnership between us reinforces our commitment to interoperability and a customer-first philosophy. We believe this partnership is the best way to advance our mission to unleash the potential of every team. And it'll allow us to improve our focus in other areas, including expanding our offerings for technical and IT teams."

PCMag also spoke to April Underwood, Chief Product Officer at Slack, who revealed more about how Slack will integrate with Atlassian's existing suite of products. The goal is to create one interface where an entire company's tools, knowledge, and human capital come together, she said.

"Slack and Atlassian have worked closely together for many years, and Atlassian's tools, including Jira, Trello, and Bitbucket have already been installed by hundreds of thousands of Slack teams," said Underwood. "This deeper partnership exemplifies our shared belief that the world of enterprise software is moving to a model in which people are building their own technology stack with the highly specialized, interoperable tools that best suit their needs."

Hipchat and Stride users can check out Atlassian's Migration Hub for more details on archiving chats and switching over to Slack.

Rob was previously an editor at SD Times covering software, managing social media, and writing narrative-driven features on any offbeat story or trend he could find. He graduated from Syracuse University's S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications ... See Full Bio